When a stealth legislative move to dismantle Wisconsin's open records law was revealed this month, a statewide uproar caused sponsors to back off. Appropro that the old lesson "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" would be taught once again around July 4, 2015.

There used to be a searchable, online database of oil and chemical spill reports that reporters could turn to in an emergency to get insight into important breaking news. But ham-handed security efforts have sabotaged the public's right to know. Right now, emergency responders are working on a spill of a cancer-causing fuel additive known as MTBE. But news reporters probably couldn't get much if any helpful information from the database today (we checked).

Three major electric utilities want the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio (PUCO) to make ratepayers pay for aging and unprofitable coal and nuclear generation plants in that state. But the ratepayers — the utilities claim — aren't entitled to know whether they might be ripped off.

In this excerpt from the latest issue of SEJournal (Spring), we debut the new EJ Academy column (a place for educators and students to explore current research on environmental journalism) with University of Michigan's Emilia Askari sharing how she and SEJ member Julie Halpert teach news innovation à la Knight Challenge style.

In a strongly worded April 9, 2014, letter by SEJ Executive Director Beth Parke and SEJ WatchDog Project Director Joseph A. Davis, SEJ urged Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel to apologize to the Toledo Blade and direct military employees not to let such illegal actions happen again: Blade journalists Jetta Fraser and Tyrel Linkhorn were detained March 28, 2014 by military police in a public area outside the Joint Systems Manufacturing Center in Lima, Ohio. Fraser was held in handcuffs, and military police threatened sexual violence against her.

InsideClimate News' Lisa Song notes that US EPA's website had originally shown 1,149,460 gallons of oil recovered from the 2010 Enbridge spill near Kalamazoo, Michigan. Sometime in mid-March 2013, she reports, that number was removed from the EPA site and replaced by one much lower, the amount Enbridge claims was spilled.

Seattle-based InvestigateWest published a feature package last summer documenting illegal parkland conversions in Michigan, New York City, and Oklahoma. They could not cover all the other states — that was left for you to do, with the assistance of their database of some 40,000 federal grants under the Land and Water Conservation Fund.